This post is definitely inspired by eSports, and I really want to talk about eSports, but I promised to not do that (as much), and the underdog didn’t win anyway.

The League of Legends World Championship finals were held today. In Berlin, so that’s fairly close by compared to Seoul, where the finals were held last year. Though the event was definitely bigger than last year’s, it actually wasn’t as showy. Last year we had a huge live performance by Imagine Dragons as well as a grand closing ceremony. This year we had… some small fireworks and free merchandise?

You know how every “internet security 101” thing talks about the little green lock next to a website’s address, and how that ensures the data you send and receive is secure? That’s because you’re accessing the website over HTTPS, rather than regular old HTTP. The difference is in the S, which you can think of as standing for Secure. All nice and dandy, but you can’t just up and slap HTTPS onto your website’s address and expect it to work. You need to actually be trusted, too.

How can computers generate random numbers when all they understand is pure logic?

Generating truly random numbers (or other data) is a… difficult problem, to make an understatement. There isn’t much in the universe that is truly random, if there’s even anything at all. The closest we come is pulling values from hard-to-predict sources like the atmospheric noise RANDOM.ORG uses. And that’s pretty neat, but they lack something the (less random) computer-generated sequences do have. Reproducibility.

For the first time in what feels like ages, I did some proper good cleaning up. Nah, my room is still a mess. But at least my digital desktop is nice and orderly now! Been doing some tweaking with how things look lately, and unfortunately that misaligned a whole bunch of junk. So cleaning up said junk seemed like a reasonable option. The choice to do so was especially fruitful since I didn’t stop at mere aesthetics!

Despite already coming quite close to hitting the limits on how much shitty code the microcontroller can hold, it’s great fun just messing around with different possibilities for patterns and what have you. Got a nice rainbow slide going on, but when I try interpolation between random colors that proves a bit hard. Still, results aren’t too bad… I think. Not entirely sure, because after all this testing, I think my eyes are starting to give up.